The mocking-bird, that sweetest of our feathered songsters, is indigenous to the central region of the great plains, and his notes are heard when the day breaks. He seeks the highest points upon the dwellings, the ridge of the house, the barn, or the top of the windmill, if there be one, where, like the Aztecs of old, or their lineal descendants, the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico to-day, he greets the coming god in the east.
Like the robin, the mocking-bird loves the companionship of man. He builds his nest near their dwellings, in the garden, the orchard, or the trees close by. Kate and Gertrude had made several attempts to get hold of some little ones in their nests, but there was always something that seemed to thwart their plans. Last year they found a nest in a grapevine in the garden, and they watched it zealously day by day, from the laying of the last twig by the parent birds, to the hatching of the two white eggs. They saw the fledglings develop from week to week, until they were nearly large enough to be taken from the nest, when one morning, on going as usual to watch the progress of the little birds, what was their horror to see a snake swallowing the last one. The other they knew, by the swelled body of the reptile, was hopelessly gone! Their disgust and sorrow may be imagined, and as it was too late in the season to think of finding another nest with young ones in it, they were forced to abandon their quest until another spring.
This April they were successful. A pair had built their nest in the vine-covered summer-house, a rustic little place that Mr. Thompson had erected out of the wild grape, for a retreat in which his wife and daughters might sit in the afternoons when they did not care to go as far as the deep woods. No harm came to the fledglings this time, and they were placed in a handsome cage bought by the girls from the proceeds of the eggs laid by their own brown Leghorn hens.
The birds soon became very tame, and made the house resonant all day long with their brilliant notes. They knew the girls the moment they came near the cage, and would stretch their wings and gently pick at their fingers when they put them between the wires. They were a constant source of pleasure, for the girls loved pets of all kinds, and taught them to return their affection by means of gentleness and constant kindness.
Joe lost his elk this spring, and he was greatly disturbed by it. He had made arrangements with an old hunter, living near Fort Harker, to go out to the Saline Valley and capture another young one. He intended to break them both to harness, and expected to have a unique team to drive. The elk was so tame that he permitted it to roam at will through the woods on the margin of the Oxhide, where it browsed on the small bushes or grazed on the luxurious grass which grew in such profusion on the creek bottom. It always returned to the corral at night for its feed of corn, but one evening it failed to come up as usual. He wandered through the woods, looking for it, when, happening to come upon a camp near the mouth of the Oxhide on the trail westward, he saw to his indignation, that the emigrants, a very ignorant set from Missouri, had butchered his elk. He gave them a talking-to that was more emphatic than choice in its language. They told him they thought it was a wild one, but he became disgusted at their falsehood, and asked them if wild elks had blue ribbons on their necks as his had, and he pulled it from the hide which was lying near their wagons. The girls had sewed it on the elk for him not a week ago. He saw that the party was such a miserable set that he could do nothing with them, so he had to leave the place, as mad as a wet hen, and abandon his idea of ever having an elk team.
It was a relief for the family to feel that they could now go where they pleased without fear of marauding bands of Indians. The winter campaign had most effectually settled their propensities for murdering and scalping the settlers, so both the girls and boys made trips to the neighbors, and went on fishing excursions, or hunted whenever they cared to. Even the wolves, which had been such a terror to the whole neighborhood, had been so successfully thinned out in several "surrounds" by the men living on the various creeks, that the raspberry patch was no longer infested by them.
Kate and her sister went up there one morning, not expecting, of course, that the berries would be ripe as early as April. As neither of them had visited the place since Kate's capture, and everything was now perfectly safe, they thought they would like to go there again.
When they arrived at the well-remembered ledge of rocks, Kate pointed out to Gertrude the exact spot where she was standing when the savages swooped down on her; and they climbed to the top where they were attacked by the wolf.
They found the vines full of blossoms, promising a beautiful crop in June, and while strolling along the bank of the stream they suddenly came upon a quail's nest in which twenty-five eggs were just hatching out. As the quail runs the moment it breaks from the shell, the girls determined to take the little ones home and bring them up as they did their chickens. The old birds made a terrible fuss. They would run a short distance from the nest, and pretend to be very lame; apparently being hardly able to move. They thus tried to induce the girls to catch them—a ruse adopted by many other birds when their young ones are in danger. But Kate and Gertrude, who were well posted in the tricks of animals and birds, paid no attention to the antics of the old quails, but were intent on catching all of the little ones they could. Even then it was a hard job, for the baby quails run almost as fast as the parents, and hide in the grass where they lie quiet until all danger is past. They succeeded, however, in getting all but four of them, and walked hurriedly back to Errolstrath with the tender things in their aprons.
"If I didn't know they were quails," said Kate, "I should think that they were young brown Leghorn chickens. Did you ever see such a resemblance, Gert?"